The Sprite
by Loudest Voice
Summary: Sometimes Anko wonders if everyone who says she's self-destructive isn't on to something.


**Disclaimer: **I don't own Naruto and I'm not making any money off this.

**AN: **Every time I try to write the main fic for this story (The Traitor and the Nine Tails), I keep getting stuck wanting to write flashbacks that would drag down the pacing and make the whole thing slower than it already is. So I decided to just go on and write the scenes anyway and just save them in a folder somewhere. Then I thought, 'hey, why not post them?'. So I'm posting them.

This happens four years before The Traitor and the Nine Tails starts proper.

* * *

The Sprite

Missions went wrong sometimes. And sometimes she just stumbled into situations that looked like missions that'd gone wrong. Anko called it bad luck. Most people who knew her called it bull-headed self-destructiveness and she admitted that they were right more often than they were wrong.

But tonight they'd be wrong. Tonight she'd been looking to stumble into a nice boy at a bar somewhere, not into a poorly lit yet still poorly concealed weapons smuggling operation. And certainly not into the acid drenched kunai that had opened a burning slash down her left calf.

She gritted her teeth and pulled herself behind the grimy desk she'd turned over during her fight with the lithe bastard who'd seared her leg, hoping that she'd be able to get in a hit or two if another enemy walked through the dusty metal door right in front of her. The bastard who'd poisoned her would die under her viper's strangling grip, gasping for air and trembling with convulsive muscle pain caused by its venom. The knowledge comforted her even as the poison from the kunai hitched a ride on her blood and weakened her joints.

Whatever she'd been hit with, she didn't know how to combat with chakra manipulation. In fact, the more she tried to concentrate on her chakra flow, the worst her symptoms seemed to get. So much for being an expert on poisons . . .

Well, this was an embarrassing way to go; cowering behind a moldy old desk while praying that the skinny street kid she'd recruited before recklessly following the obvious Grass bastard into the "abandoned" warehouse got to ANBU headquarters quick enough to send help. And that he'd run into one of the rare ANBU fucks who wasn't so arrogant that he'd dismiss a street rat outright.

The Uchiha would've taken the kid seriously enough to at least send an officer or two for basic recon, but they were still nursing amputated limbs and crushed egos. Hell, if the Uchiha were still in charge of the police, some asshole smuggler from Grass country wouldn't have managed to waltz right into the heart of Konoha, much less begun siphoning their weapons back to Hidden Grass. That goddamned attempted coup was biting everyone in the ass hard enough to make sitting painful. ANBU just wasn't suited to keep the peace. It wasn't the Everyday _Patrollings_ and_Wrist-Slappings_ Squad.

Her viper slithered behind the desk and hissed before sticking out its thin tongue. "Hey, girl," mumbled Anko. She tried to extend her right arm to welcome the slick red-scaled snake back into her sleeve, but her joints were beginning to lock shut. "I'm sorry," she said, trying to focus on her breathing. It was unfair that she could still smell the rotting wood that used to be the desk she was hiding behind and feel the thick layers of dust permeating the old office's air even though the poison was probably making its way to her brain. "Gonna take you forever to get this grimy dust of your scales . . ." Fucking hell, she didn't want to die.

Someone kicked down the office door and her viper hissed out something that was both a warning and a threat. "Sorry," Anko gritted out, hoping against her better judgment that the cavalry had arrived. Her limbs were completely immobilized. Forcing air past her nostrils was as difficult as trying to push water through a thin slit lined with thick oil. She was a sitting duck. If the person approaching her wasn't a Leaf ninja, she was as good as dead. If they weren't medics, she was as good as dead regardless.

By the time the steps were close enough that she could tell they belonged to two people, Anko couldn't move her neck. She knew when the newcomers walked around the rotting wood because her viper hissed and poised itself to strike. A shuriken entered her narrowing field of vision and struck through her viper's neck, slicing it in half. Anko felt her chest constricting and couldn't tell if it was because of the poison or because the sight of her viper's headless body twitching as it died was painful. Both, probably. She wished she had enough strength left to send out the sister snakes still waiting for orders under her long sleeves.

"You think she's one of ours?" she heard a deep voice asking. A man. Her eyelids were frozen open and her eyes were beginning to dry up and itch. How annoying and painful. Her nose itched too.

"Even if she's not, we can still interrogate her," answered a much younger voice. A boy, most likely. Not a good sign. Konoha had stopped recruiting kids into ANBU after the Third Ninja War. Well, not _Root_ of course but . . . fuck, it seemed like she couldn't focus her thoughts even when she was dying.

One of the guys stepped closer and leaned down far enough that Anko managed to get a good look of his face; at the porcelain mask adorned with blue streaks of paint covering his face, to be specific. She would've sighed with relief had she been able to. Not that he'd do her much good if he wasn't a healer. When he lifted a finger to pass in front of her eyes, Anko decided that he probably wasn't. What kind of asshole medic would take a look at her current state and not instantly realize that she was poisoned halfway to hell? The one standing over her, apparently. After glancing down at her sizzling left calf, he reached under his black cloak and pulled out a long canteen to coat his glowing right hand with water.

Fucking spirits, the night was about to get way more painful.

Surprisingly enough, when the healers passed his glowing water hand over the slash and acid burns on her calf, Anko didn't feel too much pain. She watched him extract thick, crimson droplets of goop out of her wounds and wondered why it only stung a little.

"Crow, I'm going to need more water," she heard the medic mumble as he shook his right hand clean of water and red goop. He began to pour however much was left over in his canteen over his glowing hand as his companion stepped forward. Anko still couldn't move her neck, so she saw only the hem of his black cloak, the white bandages covering his calves, and the strips of leather that made up his black sandals.

"What's her prognosis?" asked the Crow before producing some water out of . . . somewhere. _Suiton_. Anko just didn't see him string any hand seals together. He had small feet and, if his calves were anything to go by, thin limbs. Young. Kids weren't supposed to be in the regular ANBU corps anymore.

"Not good if I can't keep the poison from crossing her blood-brain barrier," answered the healer.

_Crow looks more like a healer,_ thought Anko as she half-wondered why everything was growing blurry. If only she could blink, moisten her drying eyes just a little bit . . .

Something pushing into her left carotid artery woke her up. Desperately, her mind ordered her limbs to contract, evade, _defend_, but the poison had almost completely immobilized her. Her heart rate sped up though. That was a good thing, right? Not much anyone could do if her myocardium was paralyzed. Heh . . . _myocardium._ The fuck did she learn that?

Whatever the healer was doing didn't hurt yet. It itched—the kind that bothered in the same relentless way as an itch at the back of her throat or inside one of her ears. It hurt not because of its intensity, but because she knew she wouldn't be able to scratch it, not even if she asked someone else to help her reach it. Except she ought to be able to reach her neck and—it finally got painful enough that she'd have screamed if the muscles of her throat weren't immobilized.

The medic was pulling something out of her neck. Felt like he was trying to force blood out of her pores as though her skin was a sieve. Which was exactly what he was doing actually. Fucking hell, poison attacks sucked. The medic kept scratching at her carotid, then pulling blood out of her pores long enough to make Anko consider changing her fighting style if he managed to save her. She wasn't a paragon of compassion, but she didn't want to be one of the assholes who constantly put people through what she was currently going through.

Eventually, her vision cleared enough that she could see the ANBU medic's porcelain mask as he worked to clean her blood of the poison. Her throat kept trying to contract, helplessly attempting to scream past the toxic grip on her muscles. When she finally managed to push out a weak grunt of pain, the medic nodded in encouragement. "Good," he said as he pulled more red poison of her neck.

_Scratch, you fucker!_ Anko wanted to scream. All she managed was a stream of weak grunts. At least she'd recovered enough to lift her neck. She did so and found the other ANBU standing over them. Holy shit; he was _small_. She stared at the black markings on his porcelain mask, the narrow width of his shoulders and estimated that he probably wouldn't reach her chin if she was standing up.

"Why is it taking so long?" he asked in a very deep voice for such a little sprite.

"Cause this shit's fucking around with her albumin," answered the healer. "I don't know how, but it's multiplying."

Well that wasn't good. That pretty fucking bad actually. What would happen once she ran out of blood? Or once the medic tired himself out?

"Blood pill?" asked the sprite, obviously working out one of the problems.

"Not yet," answered the healer. "First, I wanna try and—"

Someone burst through the door in front of Anko—there was door there; didn't they fucking _notice?_—and the medic stop doing whatever he was doing with the water before starting to whirl around, glowing hand poised to sever tendons and blood vessels. Anko saw the enemy raise a kunai . . .

Then scream and bring it down to his own belly to swiftly spill his entrails all over her and the medic. Mostly the medic. Anko felt only a few hits of stray blood hit her feet, wounds covering her calves included. A slice of bloody, blue-white entrails tangled itself over her left ankle.

"What. The_ shit?_" demanded the medic in a harsh, loud whisper. Anko tried to chuckle when he shivered violently. She hoped she'd managed it.

"Genjutsu," answered the sprite tonelessly.

"I meant why," clarified the healer, reaching up to remove his mask with another violent shudder. His back was to her, so Anko couldn't really see anything besides his short brown hair. "That was completely unnecessary, you vicious little fuck. I've seen how fast you move. Ugh, _water._"

"Wasp, put your mask back on," ordered the sprite, ignoring the desperate request for more water.

"Fuck you," said the medic and Anko decided she liked him even though she felt the poison's effect worsening again while he freaked out over a bit of blood. "You have any idea how many infectious diseases are carried by human blood?"

"Stop behaving like a child on his first real mission," said sprite. "You're ANBU now. Be prepared for anything."

"Ex-fucking-cuse me for not being prepared for some asshole to open his _belly _and spill his guts over my _head_," snapped the medic. Anko tried to tell him that her throat was contracting shut again so he needed to quit the dramatics, but _her throat was contracting shut again._ She didn't even manage a grunt.

"You have a _patient,_" the sprite reminded him, and Anko wished she had the power to telepathically scream a sarcastic thank you directly into his mind. "Take your cloak off, put on your mask back on, and see to her. And be certain I won't forget this outburst."

"Oh, _how_ will I go on knowing that the great Captain Crow doesn't _like_ me," snapped the medic in mock despair. Since he pushed his cloak off his wide shoulders and passed a glowing hand over his mask before putting it back on his face anyway, Anko decided that she was amused. "If I can stabilize her for long enough to get to the hospital," he started babbling as he bent down to reach for her neck again, "we can pass her off to other medics until we can figure out what the shit she got poisoned with and hopefully work out an antidote."

"Hawk says we have what we came for," said the sprite, making Anko realized that she'd just stumbled on an ongoing ANBU mission. Could the night get any more embarrassing? "More, if you count getting our hands on a possibly unknown enemy poison," continued Captain Sprite. Well, at least she'd been of use.

"Yes, yes," mumbled the medic. "The mission's another star on you lapel."

"That's not what I—" Abruptly, the sprite fell silent. "Gather a sample of the poison, get her to the hospital, and report back to headquarters. There's one last thing we have to handle tonight."

"Asshole," said the medic the moment Captain Sprite flickered away. Anko would've pointed out that he wasn't exactly brimming with sunshine either, but all she could manage was a snort. The stuck his arm under her shoulder and began to lift her to her feet. Anko was painfully grateful that her joints where bending even though she knew enough about poisons to realize that it didn't ensure that the medics would find a way to fix her.

Well, even if they didn't, there were worse ways to die than surrounded by comrades.

* * *

AN:

Crow is Itachi. I didn't want to make his ANBU code name Weasel because . . . well, then his code name would be Itachi (unless I'm misunderstanding what it means that his name means weasel).

Wasp is just an OC.


End file.
